And the online Poker champion is…

The PokerStars World Championship of Online Poker set sail on September 5th and was marked by two massive events, both of which brought an unprecedented number of players and payouts. The WCOOP kicked off with Event 1 $215 No Limit Hold’em 6-max tournament. The epic match set a $1.25 million prize pool, which was dramatically increased when 9,001 players ramped up the potential winnings to $1.8 million.

The most represented online poker site was PokerStars, who came in with 56 pro players. In the end, eleven of the PokerStars players cashed out. In the lead for the giant online poker room was Randy “nanonoko” Lew 33rd, Noah “Exclusive” Boeken 87th and Barry “barryg1? Greenstein coming 110th.

Blowing everything out of proportion was AlexKP, who held an enormous advantage over the others (71.5 million to 18.5 million). He entered the tourney with “Tutanharmon1”, which made for some interesting poker jockeying. In the end, AlexKP declined to chop and instead said to his challenging opponent shrewdly, “If you get to 30 million we can talk.”

Tutanharmon1 eventually reached 30 million plus, and again he floated the idea of a chop, this time however AlexKP went for it and agreed for an uneven chop, which left $25,000 to be handed to the victor. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, AlexKP tore into his opponent’s chips, added the $25K and tallied his total earnings into a gigantic $257,000 prize. Meanwhile, Tutanharmon1 completed play with a respectable $198,274.48.

The second Event (2) saw “CrabMaki” hit the $10,300 No Limit Hold’em High Roller tournament with a vengeance. He crushed the 313-player field and stood as a major wrecking force throughout. A nut flush during the final hand secured the championship for CrabMaki against Ville Wahlbeck. The $605,655 top prize ended up on CrabMaki’s table side, thus concluding a stunning first day of at the 9th WCOOP. Out of the 313 active players, 21 of them were from PokerStars pros.